Interview by Julie Forchhammer, Klimakultur. The interview is part of the HELP-report by Klimakultur, published in November 2025.
Klimakultur met up with Naomi Oreskes during the Beyond Oil-conference in Bergen, Norway in October 2025. Oreskes is a leading expert on topics such as the role of science in society and the disinformation campaigns that hinder climate action.
What do you think of companies like Equinor sponsoring good causes and humanitarian organisations like the Norwegian Red Cross and the Norwegian Cancer Society?
It's a kind of greenwashing where corporations who are doing damage try to clean up their reputations by giving money to good causes. I mean one famous example was the tobacco industry in the United States back in the 60s and 70s who gave a lot of money to women's sports and said “look how great we are - we're supporting women”, and supporting equal pay for women in tennis tournaments.
This is a known strategy by which corporations essentially whitewash their reputations. People often buy into it for the obvious reason, they persuade themselves that there's a net good because then the money goes to do good things.
If I were running the Red Cross I'd be worried too about how I fund this activity, but at the end of the day I don't think you can justify doing damage over here because it helps you clean something up over there. I just think that's fundamentally immoral.
If I were in the Red Cross, I would say yes, we're trying to help people for sure, and yes, we're saving lives, but now we have to weigh those lives against the people who are dying from these products.
Are we complicit in the deaths of those people? If we take money from the tobacco industry or the fossil fuel industry, then the answer is yes, we are complicit. And if we enable those industries to continue business as usual, then we're not just complicit in the deaths that are happening today, but we're also complicit in the deaths that will happen in the future.
What do you think about Equinor sponsoring educational programmes for children like First Lego League?
I understand why schools feel that they need to partner with the private sector, and I don't want to say that that's always wrong. But I really think that one of the things schools need to remember is that we count on schools to be independent. School is one of the few places in life where we're not bombarded by advertising and media that's intended to sell us products. When schools begin to cooperate in these campaigns which are essentially marketing programs, then we're really corrupting the school system. And we are undermining the independence and the objectivity of the education that our children are getting. And that can't be right.
How have companies like Equinor and the international fossil fuel industry influenced the work on climate change?
I would describe it as a 30-year disinformation campaign. The science about the role of fossil fuels in driving disruptive climate change has been known now for more than 30 years.
If you go back to 1992 when Norway and 190 some odd other countries signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, that was an expression of understanding the science that we knew what was going on, and the idea that we needed to make a commitment to address it to protect people and animals and natural beauty and the safety of communities and coastal areas and all of these things.
We knew about this 30 years ago and we had political will. So ask yourself the question, what the heck happened? Why have 30 now 33 years gone by and we've done essentially nothing? Oil and gas production is higher than ever. Fossil fuel industry profits are as high as ever. And the answer is, we've done nothing because the oil industry has been there to stop action at every step.
Every time the world was getting close to doing something, whether it was Kyoto, Paris, Copenhagen, the oil and gas industry was there to say, "No, we can't do this. No, it's too expensive. No, it's too difficult. No, trust us. We're taking care of it. No, the solution is carbon capture and storage. Don't worry, we'll do geoengineering."
They've always had some explanation, some excuse why we didn't actually need meaningful governance to address the climate. And they've been powerful and they've been successful.
I can't tell you how many times I've been with colleagues at Harvard or colleagues at other universities who say, "Oh, but the oil and gas industry needs to be our partners."
Well, that's like telling a battered woman that she has to stay with the husband who's been beating her up, right? When someone has behaved in a consistent pattern for more than 30 years, then you know what they're likely to keep doing.
And what they've proven to us is that they cannot be trusted partners and that it's just wishful thinking to think otherwise.
Watch the entire interview with Naomi Oreskes on YouTube.
